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Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Spring 2014 Sneak Peak 3

With all the changes in healthcare with the Affordable Care Act (ACA), much news and debate has flooded media outlets across the country. Just this week, CBS News released an article entitled “Is the Affordable Care Act in serious jeopardy?” According to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the plan is still going strong as she responded to reporters:

“I don't think it's in trouble. I think we just have to remain calm, get through the website getting fixed, and clarify some misrepresentations about it. It's the law of the land. It's an important economic and health stability issue, a security issue, for the American people, and I believe that in a matter of months many more people will see that." To read the full story or see the video, click here.

One of the UGA Press authors, Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, is also a vocal supporter of Obamacare and has expressed his professional opinion saying, “overall I believe the Affordable Care Act is a good start, one that can be tweaked and amended over time to address deficiencies and the unintended consequences that health care laws are prone to. I am especially pleased that the act allocates more resources to prevention and health promotion than before. The numbers are still woefully insufficient—only $4 billion—but it is a start in area that I believe is perhaps most important of all in making the country healthier and lowering our health care costs.”

Dr. Sullivan was HHS secretary from 1989 to 1993 during the George H. W. Bush administration, and, during that time, he made efforts to push through comprehensive health care reform decades before the Affordable Care Act. Currently, Dr. Sullivan is president emeritus of the Morehouse School of Medicine. He is chair of the board of the National Health Museum in Atlanta and the Washington, D.C.-based Sullivan Alliance to Transform America’s Health Professionals.

In February 2014, UGA Press will release Dr. Sullivan’s autobiography entitled BREAKING GROUND: MY LIFE IN MEDICINE. Written with David Chanoff and featuring a foreword by Ambassador Andrew Young, it is the compelling life’s story of a towering champion of higher education, medicine, and accessible health care for all.

More than just an autobiography of Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, BREAKING GROUND is also a history of how the south has changed, as well as an inspirational story for future generations of all backgrounds. Sullivan began his path to becoming the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary as a young boy growing up in Jim Crow south Georgia. From the age of five, he knew he wanted to be a doctor, and, after attending Morehouse College in the early 1950s, Sullivan went on to medical school at Boston University, where he was the sole African American student in his class. He would go on to become the founding dean and first president of the Morehouse School of Medicine. Founded in 1975, Morehouse School of Medicine is one of four predominately African American medical schools in the country.